Ladies and gentlemen, if it's good enough for Apple Paltrow-Martin, it is good enough for my daughter…

I should, of course, be making this delicious mix of chickpeas, sesame seed paste, garlic, lemon juice, salt and olive oil myself but I'm afraid that a month of baby-led weaning has left me reluctant to approach the Magimix. Perhaps some day…

Actually, I have made it before but I do prefer the shop-bought stuff. It's creamy-licious. The baby has it on toast, rice cakes (more of which elsewhere) or banana if she's feeling adventurous and I am too frazzled to clean her up between courses. It does go everywhere but it's quite benign really, thanks to the pale colour, and easily wiped off.

Now, some people might want to shy away from hummus as the sesame paste can be a trigger for allergies but neither my partner (he's actually my husband but that makes me feel so OLD) are allergic-y and we eat a lot of Lebanese food so we've decided to go for it. We were in a cafe today enjoying a spot of meze and Babybear was perfectly content to suck hummus off some flatbread. The pickled, hot red pepper that the Husband handed her by mistake was another story…

PS Marks & Spencer has just brought in a couple of new hummuses (hummi?). There's an organic one, which is tasty and whatnot and only available in the smaller size. But the real stroke of genius is their idea to package three tiny little pots (say, two sandwiches worth) so that you don't have to keep throwing out unused hummus after three days. Wonderful, wonderful work. Although only available in Reduced Fat and containing maltodextrin, which is a bit of a bummer.

Aaah, that most capricious of fruits, with its three-minute period of perfect ripeness book-ended by weeks of rock hard-ness or headily perfumed squishiness. I can't be bothered with them, really.

I've given them to the baby a couple of times, and she thinks they are okay. I don't bother giving her chip-sized portions, i just slice the bum-cheek off one side and had it over. It is kinda messy but at least it's wet and clear so it's easy to wipe up.

Well, it's not the most interesting ingredient but it's pretty useful to take out with you as it's pretty clean. I used to cut it lengthways in the chip shape stylee (taking the seeds out) but interestingly the baby has recently decided that she quite likes it in the form of a thick-ish disc. I think it might be because it is nicer to chew on, and the cooler the better, what with her poor teeth…

Green, slimy, deee-licious, the avocado is probably the blandest foodstuff that my daughter eats. I first gave her it as a finger food proper (not a great success – it shot out of her hand and proved impossible to pick up – cue tears of frustration) but now she gets it on toast or a rice cake. I take one out with us to the park and I eat half of it on bread (doused in lemon juice and buckets of salt, it's a heart attack waiting to happen) while the bub has some plain.

Some people think they are a pain to open up but the secret is to slice it in half lengthways and twist it (not unlike the peach) leaving you with one side open and the other still containing the stone. The spiffy thing with the avocado is that if you doink the knife into the stone it will lift straight out. Does not work with a peach, as I found out to mine and the NHS's cost.

This creepy, furry orange fruit is one of my daughter's favourites… bleurgh. Thank god it has a fairly short season.Wash it, cut it in half, remove the stone and hand to child with the skin side facing outwards. Actually, they're not bad to take out to cafes etc with you as they fit quite nicely into those silly wee tupperwares and can be cut open with a normal knife. But they do ripen quickly and get very squishy very fast so time it right or everyone will get covered in orange mush.

My favourite food ever, and now my baby's… I'm so very proud. I just wash it, half it across the stone, and twist sharply so that the halves come apart then cut into quarters and remove the stone. She used to grab my hand when I was eating peaches so we first started
with me holding it and her sucking/biting on it but it didn't take long
for her to want to take it herself.

I've noticed that it's easier to give the baby the peach quarter with the skin side facing outwards as she seems to go at it from underneath with her rather marvellous brand new TWO TEETH. My cup runneth over…

Anyway, all I'm saying it that it might be worth noting which side your baby prefers to have the skin side facing. To be honest I was a bit paranoid about her eating the skin to begin with but apart from a couple of bleary-eyed spit-ups she was absolutely fine. Keep an eye on it, though. If we see a worryingly large bit of food going in, my husband and I start making hilarious puking faces, sticking our tongues out, crossing our eyes and whatnot (it's veeeeery attractive) and she normally laughs and spits it out.

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Now, cheese is a trickier prospect than it initially sounds, so here are my thoughts.

My friend, who is Annabel Karmelising her eight-month-old child, is now getting to the stage where her darling boy (and he IS a darling) is eating finger foods. Cheese-wise, she went out to the supermarket and bought the blandest, most organic-est cheddar she could get her mitts on. I think it was a 'Strength 1' cheese, on that peculiar cheese tastiness index that all supermarkets seem to have adopted recently. (Don't get me started on that – since when did 'strength' have any bearing on taste?) Naturally, the bold boy loved it and now happily feeds himself flavourless cheddar whenever the opportunity arises. However, the system does mean that their's is now a two-cheese household.

Bearing in mind that I carelessly combine both a capacity for laziness and disorganisation, I can't handle the pressure of maintaining a ready supply of both parental and infant cheeses, so we just started Babybear off on a vintage cheddar. (Size 5! Get us!) Happy to report that she enjoyed it, but the problem was that it crumbled into pieces almost immediately which was very frustrating for a hungry nipper.

We've shopped around, airily dismissing the brittle curded offerings of Somerfield, Tesco and Safeway, but finding both the Isle of Bute organic cheddar from Sainsbury's and the Canadian Mature from M&S rather tasty. The Marks one is best on points for the kiddies as it is quite greasy so doesn't fall apart but I personally like the sainsbury's one better.

All in all, my advice would be to start your child on the cheese you like and adjust upwards or downwards from there. As for working out how to cut it up, it rather depends on the crumbliness or otherwise of the cheese. That Canadian Cheddar can handle being cut up into a chip shape, and with the others sometimes a small squarish slice about 5cm x 5cm x 1cm holds together well, but there's more wastage.

(Gad, who knew there was so much to cheese? And I didn't even go near the whole dairy intolerance thing. Mostly because I don't know anything about it. As usual, if anyone has anything to add about cheese/baby led weaning etc, post away. I should go now, as my head has just exploded due to calculating the perfect Baby Led Weaning dimensions for a slice of cheese. I used to be a career woman, for god's sake.)

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According to Gill Rapley, you are better off giving your child toast than bread because the toast is kinda crunchier and is less likely to go claggy and get stuck in the babies' mouths. (I hardly need add that she expresses the concept rather more elegantly than I just did.)I started Babybear off with some crusts of Italian bread in a cafe (honestly, the life I lead… it's a social whirl) but it was a bit too sharp so I slightly pre-chewed it in the mummy bird style.

Back at home, I am more likely to toast bread, pop some cream cheese or butter or hummus on it and then cut it into slices for the baby.

Initially I used white bread (for that mega-insulin rush) but I have slowly moved her towards a brown multi-grain that her father and I eat. She did a bit of gagging on it a couple of times but it's fine now. I'm not sure about the brown bread, however, as I read on the internet that fibre can interfere with Vitamin C absorption. But we all know that things you find on the internet can be very unreliable, har, har…

If anyone has any information on this I'd be delighted to hear about it. Cheers, all.